With all of the bad economic news we have been hammered with for the last year and a half, I wonder when we as a Nation can finally admit that we are in a Depression?
Certainly, there are no new Hoovervilles in Central Park (NYC), people have not been reduced to carrying money around in wheel barrels or jumping out of windows by the thousands. But when millions of Americans have quit looking for work, are working without insurance, and degreed professionals are struggling to maintain full-time jobs at a minimum wage, such a condition surely exists in spirit, if not in name.
When life savings are destroyed, retirement accounts decimated, future jobs prospects bleak at best, trusted manufacturing jobs a distant memory, and many once core American competencies outsourced to other nations and we have become a Debtor nation, we have to ask ourselves if we are in this nation’s second Great Depression?
The nature of work has changed in our society. We have transitioned from a once proud Nation that built things, sent astronauts to the Moon and built a Great Society, to the Twenty First Century contract-based, shrinking economy. Loyalty from employers to employees no longer exists. The notion of guaranteed employment is gone. There is NO guarantee that our children or grandchilren will be better off than we were.
When many once proud American institutions from Lehman Brothers to AIG, General Motors to Fannie Mae teter on the brink of failure and require Government bail-outs for their survival, what should we call this period in American history if not a Depression?
What do you think?